The Shtetl

by Joachim Neugroschel (editor)

Book by

Genres: Jewish, History

592 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Joachim Neugroschel (1938-2011) was the translator of some two hundred books, including works by Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. He won three PEN translation awards and a French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour]

For several of the selections included here, I'd actually go with a five-star review, but because the overwhelming majority are curiously and perhaps wildly uninteresting, it gets dragged down to 3 stars. Worth reading are: "Monday" by Kulbka, "Stempeniu" by Sholom Aleichem and various other much shorter works. The bulk of the selections are bland and often seem interminable. Weirdly, too, there is a lengthy selection of fictional works that attack the notion of the shtetl and its traditions which seems a little incongruous in a collection that is ostensibly of the shtetl. The translation at times feel a bit clunky and overwrought, too, but it's hard to say if its the source or the translator.

[Amy]

2.5